


Tenderness and Ferocity

by Polia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Body Worship, Bucky Barnes Feels, Coming In Pants, Dom Bucky Barnes, Dom/sub Undertones, Dream Sex, Dry Humping, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, F/M, Fluff, Gentle Kissing, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Jealousy, Light Bondage, Love, Mutual Pining, Neck Kissing, Protective Bucky Barnes, Romance, Rough Sex, Sexual Content, Smut, Soft Winter Soldier, Sub Winter Soldier, Surreptitious Breeding kink, Vaginal Sex, Wet Dream, dark bucky barnes, or more accurately Protective Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:28:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29131062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polia/pseuds/Polia
Summary: The Winter Soldier is starting to make stupid mistakes in the field, which is Bucky's way of trying to wrest back control and sabotage his handlers. Hydra brings a new doctor to figure out what's wrong with him and fix it. As she spends time with him, she becomes fond of the Winter Soldier, and he becomes fond of her. Bucky has other ideas.Or, a fic in which the Winter Soldier is the good guy and Bucky is actually the bad guy.Updated every Monday. Inspired by two imagines fromhushyourimaginationistalkingon tumblr.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader, The Winter Soldier/Original Female Character(s), The Winter Soldier/Reader
Comments: 49
Kudos: 82





	1. The First Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had a very elaborate explanation about what is going on, but basically it's:
> 
> The Winter Soldier: Looks like they could kill you but is actually a cinnamon roll  
> Bucky Barnes: Looks like a cinnamon roll but would actually kill you  
> Hydra Doctor lady: Sinnamon roll
> 
> By the way, you can also read this fic at [bvccy.tumblr.com](https://bvccy.tumblr.com/tagged/Tenderness-and-Ferocity).

_"There resides infinitely more good in the demonic than in the trivial man."_  
— Kierkegaard

Away from the world and beyond the scrutiny of common knowledge, secreted away into a methodically manufactured nothingness, in a damp room in a concrete fortress, a flock of doctors busied around the returned Soldier — The Asset. Or, today, the Problem.

As they performed the standard tests and checks and tinkered at the dents in his mechanical arm, he sat quietly, personless. Underneath all that, he was expecting another "corrective calibration", another session where everything hurt until it went blank. His whole body was expecting it, tight with muscle-memory that ran deeper than his own with horrors he no longer had access to.

He had almost failed his mission, he completed it by dumb luck alone. He knew it, and his handlers knew it. What was left of his ego had bitterly learned long ago that his successes were due to the brilliant doctors, but the failures were his own.

Nevertheless, there was no fear in him — at least, not at the level that was _present_ , that watched the doctors taking readings off the machines, recording his vitals in their notebooks, checking his restraints against the cold metallic chair. But there were parts of him where the real fear still lived. He could not bring it up, and examine, or control, but he felt it stirring in the pit of his mind.

At the periphery of his consciousness, he knew what they were thinking: those failed parts of himself had gotten in the way, had compromised his mission; like a bad reflex in the wrong direction at the worst moment. So they were going to try harder this time, keep trying, keep trying, until they cleaned up all that was left of his dissenting self at the bottom of his brain.

The Soldier waited for them to begin, like last time, and the time before that. But some were talking to each other, some were sitting down and waiting, others were drinking their coffee... They were doing things they weren't supposed to do, and the part of him where the fear settled was starting to itch. What was different about this time?

_Get out get out get out._

When he heard the echoes of a walking pair come closer, saw their shadows licking up the wall beyond the foggy lab door, and saw them stop to talk right outside, the Soldier didn't think, nor feel, nor react, and for once it wasn't because the Soldier didn't _do_ that, but because he made a conscious effort not to.

He didn't miss the guarded gaze shared between the nurses securing his legs, but then they got up, and with the rest they gathered their gadgets and scopes and manila folders and ambled out of the room. The pair outside waited for them all to leave, exchanged some parting words, then one of them went inside with him and the other closed the door with a hiss and a click: locked.

The Soldier had never seen _this_ doctor before. Was that what she was? She did wear a lab coat, with the Hydra insignia pinned to her lapel, a standard issue name tag, and had in every other way the look of all the rest of them.

The way she looked at him that first time, scanned him from a safe distance as she clung to her folders like a lifeline, told him she had never seen him before, at least not up-close. But her eyes didn't linger on his metal arm — so she knew about it? They didn't stay anywhere very long, though she did direct a second's worth of a frown at his naked chest — oh, were they supposed to have dressed him up for her?

She took a deep breath, thinking so loudly he could almost hear it, then took a solid step forward in a straight line toward him. Her scent could reach him now, a sweet and stinging perfume that was familiar but now unrecognisable, with fresh notes on her throat and warmer aftertastes lingering in her hair, which was clasped back in a tight French twist. Underneath that, soap and bitter coffee, the sterile air of the facilities, and freshly ironed cotton. She looked right at him, and through him. Perhaps she did not like how his eyes followed hers. She seemed afraid, but of him?

_Of failure._

She came to a stop at the table by his side and busied herself arranging her files. Her shirt looked standard issue: white, pressed, keeping its form rigidly while her tight chest fluttered underneath. Her waist held her up stiffly, unmoving, as she bent slightly forward. Her straight black skirt went down to her knees. Her legs were clad in imperceptibly thin stockings, tapering in black doeskin shoes.

The Soldier's gaze caressed its way back up to her face to find her disapproving look waiting for him. He looked back without shame, taking in her elegant little features gentled by large eyes, a soft mouth, lashes that left spiderweb-shadows on her cheeks under the clinical light.

She kept her eyes on him unwavering as she stepped back and around to face him, to look at him from the other side, then closer, then back again. She was examining him like all the others did - like an object - but he didn't mind. Her attention melted the fear away.

Finally, she got closer, and with a touch made to gentle a wild animal tilted his head back and up. She stood to his right where his flesh arm was, checked his pupil dilation with a little light, checked his pulse with her fingers, his blood-oxygen with a pinch at his thumb — he could have told her the other doctors already went through this with him.

_But why tell her anyway?_

And just like that, she was back to not looking at him. She finished her check-up and turned briskly back to her papers. He noted her face had moved first and her body followed — disgust, avoidance; ah, did he smell? They never did prioritise cleaning him after a mission.

"Can you speak?" she asked, looking straight at him again.

"Yes."

"What are you?"

"Soldier."

"What am I?"

"Doctor."

"Sit up straight... Now close your eyes."

He heard her step closer, heard her stop right in front of him, between his spread legs. Her voice was so close now, and much too soft.

"I'm going to touch the sides of your face. You will tell me if it feels the same."

She lightly ran the tips of her fingers from his temples, down his cheekbones, down the hollowed stubbled cheeks, ending at his chin, then back up and down again.

"Same?"

"Yes."

"Keep your eyes closed. I'm going to make small sounds with my fingers next to your ears, you will tell me which side it's on."

"Right. Left. Right. Right."

"Open your eyes now."

He caught sight of her just as she stepped back.

"Did they finish the repairs on you?"

He looked at his left arm and saw everything was closed back up. "Yes."

"Alright. Make fists with both of your hands, and hold them up, like this. Alright, now keep them steady and don't let me press them down."

She tested his right fist, then his left, her hands barely covering the span of his knuckles. Both fists were steady as rocks against her efforts.

"Now, close your eyes again. Can you touch your thumb to your index on your right hand? Good, now go through all the fingers, touch the thumb to the fingertip... then back to the index. Good. Now your left hand, keep your eyes closed."

He could hear her throat work to swallow at the clink-clink of the metal digits.

"Alright, stop."

She stepped back to the table, picked up a little silver hammer with a rubber head, then came back to his side. "Keep your right arm relaxed, I'm just going to check your reflex."

She pressed her dry, cold thumb to the inside of his elbow and tap-tapped against her finger, his arm bouncing slightly in its confines.

"Alright, now I'm going to do something a little silly. But you won't laugh at me, will you?"

"No." His dry delivery didn't put her much at ease.

Moving to his left side, she did the same thing to his metal arm. She tapped the little hammer over her thumb, where the inside of the titanium elbow was, and tapped and tapped.

"Makes sense I guess..." she said to herself when nothing happened.

As she ran her tests on him, he could feel her relax, noticed her start to speak not just at him but to him, like other people spoke to each other. The Soldier wasn't sure it was smart of her to drop her guard like that, but he couldn't begrudge it. He wanted to speak to her like a real person too, but the want knocked itself against a wall.

She worked her way around him, back to a desk, sat down primly, opened a folder, crossed out some boxes on a yellowed piece of paper... He watched her openly, sliding his gaze down to her tightly-crossed legs and back up, but was not too fixated on the ornamental parts of her to not notice her swallow hard and squeeze her pen as she became instinctively aware of being looked at.

"I'm going to ask you some questions." she said without looking up. "Do you know where we are?"

He had to think for a second for this one. "Headquarters Alpha 3."

"What's the nearest town?"

"I don't know."

"What country are we in?"

"I don't know."

"What day of the week is it?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know what year it is?"

"No."

She wrote something down and sighed — she wasn't disappointed, was she? After all, he didn't need to know those things. But when she looked back up, she didn't seem upset with him. She even smiled at him a little, he almost smiled back.

"There are some more tests I want to run, but I can't do that with you tied up. We'll have another session, if it's approved."

He didn't nod, didn't blink, didn't betray the hope he felt at the anticipation of being trusted. Even untied, she would be safe with him, he wouldn't hurt her. Did they know that? Did she know that?

A knock on the door grabbed her attention. Too eagerly for his liking, she jumped up and opened it.

"Done?"

"Yes, I'll just get my things."

Standing just a step inside the room, the Director looked straight at him, then turned his attention back to her, waiting.

They stepped outside together, but by negligence or uncaring left the door ajar. He listened on as they whispered to each other.

"So?"

"Both hemispheres seem very well coordinated, as well as I can tell considering the arm... There seems to be no... leakage of anything from one side or the other, or from previous missions. To me, the Asset seems fully functional. But I need more tests to assess the state of his memory."

"What's the problem?"

"As I suggested in my proposal, Sir, the methods used in the Project affect his explicit memory, but the implicit memory isn't really addressed. I need confirmation."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means we should probably schedule..."

"No, what you said about his memory."

"Oh, well... As I wrote to you, Sir..." She took a pause to swallow her words. "Explicit memory is... the things you can bring forward in an instant, that you can talk about. But if you were to... if you were to smell a perfume, for example, and you suddenly remembered it because it was what your mother wore when you were a child, that's implicit memory. It stays in the brain but you don't know it's there unless there's a stimulus. And because it's there, it can still influence what you do, even if you don't realise it..."

"I see. Couldn't our equipment fix it?"

"I don't think it can be calibrated for something like that. Such memories are usually connected to real functions, like muscle memory or the senses. And besides, wiping him repeatedly probably resets his integration level, which can be counterproductive... especially if he was predisposed to higher disintegration before the serum."

"So what do you need?"

"First of all, he might need to be kept... er, thawed, at least for a while."

"If your little experiment is a failure, we're gonna waste valuable time on him."

"It's just that it isn't good to freeze and unfreeze even an ordinary slab of meat, let alone a complex animal like that. It could be connected to the malfunctions they're reporting with his behaviour. Not to mention the lack of REM sleep, which makes it even worse for stabilising his thinking, his reflexes..."

"Alright, we have empty cells we can keep him in."

"And for the next session, if it's approved Sir, we should maybe have a brand new room. Not this lab, and not somewhere where he's locked down. Subjects usually form underlying associations with common environments, it impedes the process."

"I fear we might be spoiling him, you know. His own 'suite', his own lounge now, no more cryo, and I don't know when the last time was that he saw a woman..."

"Certainly he sees them all the time on missions, Sir."

"Yeah, through a scope. Will that be all?"

"One more thing... if it's possible, to not have surveillance during the sessions, Sir..."

"And why would you ask for that?"

"In case I need to apply unethical methods."

"'Though I can respect that, don't you think you're asking for a bit much?"

"Oh, please Sir."

The Soldier could hear the smile in her voice, the deliberate lightening of the tone to something girlish, and through the fogged glass he saw her brush a hand over the Director's elbow, just quickly enough to stay professional. The armrest under his bionic arm started creaking in his grip.

"I'll keep it all under budget, I promise. Oh, and could we maybe arrange to have him washed more often?"

"I'm going to leave before you ask for dessert. You better deliver."

"Yes, Sir. Hail Hydra."

"Hail Hydra."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer, I haven't seen a single Captain America movie since TWS in 2014, and I don't even remember that one. I should probably have rewatched CA:TFA and CA:TWS to refresh my memory, but yolo.
> 
> So I'm just going off of stuff I've read in the wiki and commonly-agreed-upon-fanfiction-canon ahaha. It's just really open-ended, like the Director in this fic isn't really Alexander Pierce or anyone in particular, but you can definitely read it like that. The Headquarters is not necessarily the one in Siberia, but can be, hence the multiple HQs (I mean if I were a nefarious organisation, I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket).
> 
> By the way, there will be an appendix after the last chapter with links to references and credits and such, so look forward to that.
> 
> And finally, I'm running solo on this fic so please do your worst in the comments on whatever you think can be fixed here. I have no beta-reader and I need all the help I can get.


	2. The Second Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just about setting the scene and establishing the characters, nothing too exciting. And two idiots slowly falling in love, in their own ways.

_"Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. if we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other… Technical perfection strives toward the calculable, human perfection toward the incalculable."_  
— Ernst Jünger

"Tell me about your last mission. Why did it fail?"

"It didn't."

"Why did it almost fail." _Excuse me._

"First shot missed the target."

"Mhmm... Did something get in the way?"

"No."

"Do you think it was a miscalculation on your part?"

"I don't know."

"I... See, I have no idea how shooting works." she laughed. "Did you misjudge the distance, maybe? The wind, the... trajectory?"

"No."

"So why do you think the first shot failed?"

"The shot didn't fail. _I_ failed. And I don't know."

"But you got him the second time. So what went differently?"

"I don't know."

She thought _she_ knew, but she needed to work him through it. A lot depended on it, and it wasn't just her dedication to her career, but to the whole Winter Soldier program. None of the other recruits were remotely as promising, their minds unhinged or too far gone, hours wasted into them and all that brilliant work. If she got it right just this once, they could do _so much_ more, so much...

Hydra's reach tended to exceed their grasp. This led them to be overly ambitious and fail — painfully, and often. She had to remind herself that it led to growth, that perseverance in the face of your own failures was what growth was. But if she could contribute to a move in a new direction, a _right_ direction, she will have accomplished something with her life. Even if she didn't get any credit and was never remembered, as many of the staff often weren't, at least she could have that small knowledge for herself. She certainly didn't have much else: just her job, and distant family, and colleagues that passed for friends.

"I'm going to say three words. Try to remember them: glass, gecko, charity. Say them back."

"Glass. Gecko. Charity."

"Good. And three things you can see in this room. How about... the lightbulb, that metronome over there, and the sink in the corner. Name them."

"The lightbulb. The metronome. The sink."

"Very good. Now I'm going to get you some paper and a pen." She paused mid-way from getting up to ask "Promise you won't stab me with it?"

He stopped to think, and said "I won't. ...Stab you, that is."

With a wry smile, she went to the little table on the other side of the room.

The Director agreed to give the Soldier a cell with a bunk to sleep in, some bare amenities, and now he spent his time there when he wasn't in session with her, or training (which was most of the time) . She couldn't tell if the change in environment or sleeping made any difference. But as the fabric of his speech got looser every time she plucked at it with a barbed question, she was convinced it had to matter.

They had their meetings in a completely different room, with no bars or windows, and no cameras either. It would have been intimidating to anyone else, that sort of consummate interrogation room lifted out of a dystopia, but anything was better than the sterile stench of the lab where they killed him over and over only to start him up again.

And she wasn't afraid that he would hurt her anyway, not when she reminded herself he physically couldn't disobey. The moments when she forgot about that, however...

Nevertheless, he kept almost as still as he had when he was strapped down. He didn't move more than he needed to, and didn't say more than he needed to. But in spite of everything, she felt herself slip into seeing him as just another person, as a man.

_Big mistake. He's a machine, a machine, a machine._

But when she turned around and saw him waiting quietly, the body at ease, the mouth sad but relaxed, those large grey eyes tracking her, and behind them a mind so clever, so curious... When she saw him like that, she felt dirty to have ever dehumanised him.

"I want you to draw a clock for me." she said as she placed the paper before him. "Just a circle, with the hours and everything... Set the hands of the clock at sixteen past two."

She sat back down and watched him, looking at how he held her pen — how long had it been? it's not like Hydra needed him to sign any documents, so this was probably the first time he held one since... — how he drew the circle: strong, steady, with almost an artist's precision — how he set the numbers: 12, 6, 3, 9, methodical. He finished in short order and slid the paper back.

"Good." she smiled. "Very good. Now, let's turn it over and..." giving it back to him, blank face up, "let's imagine that's a map of Europe, west to east. Could you point out where Portugal would be? Where do you think... Good. And Iceland? ...Yes. How about Greece? So the Bosphorus runs where?... Good, and where's Sweden? Yes... And do you think you can point where Belarus is? Very good... Can you name their capitals for me?"

"Lisbon. Reykjavik. Athens. Stockholm. Minsk."

"Excellent." she beamed at him for one unguarded second before she looked back down and missed his school-boy smile. "What about those words from before, do you remember what they were? The words I told you to remember?"

"Glass. Gecko. And charity."

"And the things in the room?"

"The lightbulb. The metronome. The sink."

"Very good." Then she took the paper from him, put it in her folder on top of all the other notes, and tucked the pen back in.

"Did you sleep last night?" she asked pointedly, looking him straight in the eyes.

The suddenness of her question didn't seem to put him off, at first. "Yes."

"Did you dream of anything?"

"Y-yes."

"Do you remember what it was about?" Silence. "Soldier, do you remember what it was about?"

"No."

She noticed with a shudder of excitement that he just lied to her — a fraction-of-a-second twitch at the corner of his left eye gave him away. Or maybe she just imagined it...? After all, he shouldn't be able to lie. Right?

"There's nothing wrong with dreaming, you know." she prodded with deliberate sweetness, the same sort she used with the Director, he noticed with displeasure. "Even if it's about bad things... it's a sign of improvement." Silence. "And I won't tell anyone, I promise. This is just between us." Silence. "Alright, well... That's good too."

She made no effort to hide her disappointment, and the Soldier swallowed while he kept the coolth of his eyes on her. He knew she was trying to charm it out of him — and what's more, she wanted him to know she was trying. Just like he wanted her to know that he wanted bitterly, ardently to tell her.

But she either didn't notice or didn't care, and she changed her tone to that of punishing reserve. "Right then, as there's nothing left to our session today, I can let you go."

She got up briskly and gathered her things without looking directly at him, sipping glances from the corner of her eye to his right arm as it rested on the table, pale and muscular and chiselled smooth, up to the round shoulder which disappeared under the t-shirt. A glimpse, further down, of his thick legs in the black combat fatigues.

He got up and followed her as she started walking. She unlocked the room and directed him out with a nudge of her head. They went out together, the Soldier following behind her clipped steps with his particular gait, heavy boots echoing through the corridor in a strut that lilted under the odd weight of his metal arm.

As they approached the T-section of the hallway with the two guardsmen standing ready for him, another man noticed her and stopped to wait, smiling politely. He wore the same lab coat, but with an amalgam of comfy grey sweater and jeans underneath.

"Hello, Kai." she called as they got closer, a genuine smile in her voice.

"Got that report you wanted."

"It finally finished downloading? Thought it was stuck."

"Nah, it was just too big. Maybe we can apply more filters next time."

"Narrow it down, yes..."

She turned to walk with her colleague toward their offices without so much as a parting word while the two guardsmen walked him in the other direction, toward the training facilities. He spared one longing look back, and as if sensing him she turned her head and caught his eyes for one moment, before turning back to the limp-wrist scrag who had her attention.

"How's the test subject?" Kai asked with a knowing smile.

"Fine. He has... excellent neuroplasticity."

"Wow. That good, huh?"

"By the way, did your girlfriend finish her forensics dissertation yet, or...?"

"Such threats are completely unnecessary."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So clearly our boy had a naughty dream last night. And he's gonna have it again next chapter, that's where the fic rating and some of the tags will come into play.
> 
> And yes I'm convinced his eyes are supposed to be grey, not blue. Nobody can change my mind.


	3. The Dream and the Third Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here comes the smut, hold on tight.

_"Life in essence can only be sustained because of the discontinuity. Why else does one sleep? Not to rest, but above all to forget. [...] If one could prevent mankind from sleeping, I am convinced that a massacre without end would ensue; it would mean the end of history."_  
— Emil Cioran

  


All the useless gadgets clattered, without clattering, to the floor. The exposed skin of her back shone against the pressing dark, under a light that wasn't there. Her arms stretched out in front of her to grab the table, to clench in little fists, to crawl away from him... He clasped both her wrists in one heavy hand while he held her by the hip with the other. The stranger looked unfamiliar and out of place, yet boyishly handsome, a lissome thoroughbred cut from pale stone.

He'd already yanked her shirt halfway down her back, leaving a delicate pair of peachy straps to cut into her shoulders as she tried to pull herself up and away. With his other hand, he raised the black flag of her skirt inch by hurried inch. Two flesh hands, pawing at her squirming silhouette.

Those legs that had _teased him so_ were now buckled in a tangle of red lace, at once parted and constricted and leaving her fully victim to him. Above her he loomed, then leaned, slowly down to feel her warmth, his dark green shirt sticking against her back. 

In a voice dry with disuse he taunted her to say that she wanted it, to beg for it, though he sounded utterly disinterested and his eyes — he couldn't actually see his eyes, but he could hear that same disuse and disinterest ringing in their glare. She whimpered underneath him but said nothing, insulted from both directions by his grimy touch and transparent insults.

"Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?" said the stranger — but not to him, nor to her — as he buried his face in her fragrant hair and his hips into hers and himself into her... But no relief came, nor satisfaction, and it felt like no matter how close he got to her, couldn't be further away.

He battered and battered and broke through, with great delight at just the _effort_ , and he made tremors rise then relent in her tense legs. Her high heels tapped against the floor in a trembling rhythm that undercut her plaintive moans until he stopped, and settled inside her, and laughed against her shoulder in a harsh exhale. He taunted her over how she sounded, how she felt, how he felt in her.

The more she withdrew, the more aggressively he followed, always fighting her and pulling the fight out of her in honeydew dollops that had nowhere left to go but to seep and stain his nice trousers. Her shoulders went up in a useless attempt to hide, but he squeezed her wrists in warning and bit her shoulder, the nape of her neck, anywhere he could reach that would punish her until she learned to stay still.

"Oooh yesss, that's it... I hate you so much." he laughed in manic joy, eyes falling closed against her throat.

The hand that held her hip squeezed her closer, pressing her so desperately against him like he was trying to crawl up inside and never leave. She whined in pain, muffled by her arms and the table. The stranger cooed against her ear and teased against her hips, turned her inside out and back together, discordant with her mewls and wails as he clung to her and she unconsciously to him the more his galloping pace opened her up and brought her out to meet him.

He wasn't so much pleasing himself as punishing _her_ , and only interrupted his focus to laugh or hiss at some new-discovered throbbing, a frisson to rub against, a frothy surrender that he worked hard to push _through_ until she took it again.

"I'm gonna kill you," he snarled down at her. "I swear I'm gonna kill you..."

No amount of resistance could carry her through his punishing thrusts, and no surrender was enough, and it all went on and on until the threads holding her up started to unravel, leaving her a blushing rough and bloody shade that the stranger could claim as an extension of himself. He rubbed away the parts that weren't base and grimed up what was left. Only thoughtless sounds came out of her now as she struggled to fit him, and fit into him.

The stranger heaved hotly with the effort of holding still, feeling _over_ and _through_ her deliberately and seeking still more, pressing his body down to suppress her new, aching, wet shivers.

With a pain melting through her surrender, down, down into pleasure, she tried to plead with him and she moaned his name, his real name, but after the first flush of recognition he stopped caring because he knew he wouldn't remember it anyway and —

_Wait, why wouldn't he remember it?_

Eyes shot open only to be greeted by the cement ceiling of his cell. The Soldier sighed and turned his head, looking at the corner where the bulbous little camera was. He looked to the door and saw the parting screen still closed shut — he was awake too early. With a groan, he turned over in his cot and pressed the cold metal hand where he ached.

* * *

On their third session, after the guardsmen left, he stepped into the room to find a collection of strange equipment and wires on the table, and a mix of subtle scents coming from two wooden containers. She sat in her chair, waiting for him with a smile, her sleek legs crossed together tightly. She wasn't wearing her lab coat anymore.

"Good morning." she said as they closed the door. "Come on in, sit down. None of this stuff is going to hurt you, I promise."

Reluctantly, he obeyed, his boots sounding slow and heavy through the room as he made his way toward her. He let himself fall in the seat and rested his hands on his tense thighs.

"It's just a GSR monitor. I'll only strap these around your fingers, you won't feel a thing." She demonstrated by wrapping one around her finger, wiggling, holding it up for his doubtful eyes. He had no choice anyway, so he rested his right arm on the table. She took his hand and opened the palm up, holding it gently while her other hand went to a little tube and scooped up a salty-smelling goo.

"For conductivity." she explained as she rubbed it just barely in his tough skin. "Be grateful it's not an EEG, otherwise I'd have to rub this stuff into your scalp. You'd look like a punk that got lost in the rain." she laughed, but it died quickly as the Soldier frowned and shifted in his seat. 

Then she took two of the straps and wrapped one around his index, another around his middle finger, and turned his palm back down. She clicked the machine on and it beeped in confirmation, beginning a reading of his skin and what was going on underneath.

In plain terms it was a rudimentary lie detector, meant to scan for stress and some primitive emotions. Maybe he knew that or he didn't, but she could tell she had to work him into it, calm him down before she could get an accurate reading of what moved him.

"Do you know what time it is?"

"You have a watch." he grunted, looking at the worn leather strap around her wrist.

"Yes, but do _you_ know?" she smiled.

"0803 hours."

"Yes. Do you know where we are?"

"Headquarters Alpha 3."

"Good. Do you know what day of the week it is?"

"No."

"Did you sleep last night?"

"Yes."

"Did you have any dreams?"

"No." he said with a sardonic smile. The line on the monitor moved ever-so-slightly, but it could just be a reaction of their tiff about it the other day. Or, he was lying to her again.

They spent the rest of their session with him strapped up to it while she made use of a couple of boxes and the little things inside. With eyes closed, he had to guess what she placed between his fingers: a piece of velvet, silk, a pocket watch, a cufflink, a snow globe.

The edge that separated the Asset from whoever he was before was smudged only so slightly, by necessity, the way it was with all the other soldiers in the program — they could still talk, after all, and read and write, and still employ the complexities of hand-to-hand and armed combat, all things they learned in a past life and used now for Hydra's ends. What made her soldier the best was how sharp that edge was, how steady — until it wasn't.

He retained good coordination, if his finely drawn clock was anything to go by, a steadiness that an unbalanced brain would have found difficult. They had tried, with past soldiers, to split the two brain hemispheres physically, severing the membrane that bridged between them in an effort to isolate the old soldier from the new.

The right hemisphere housed contextual perception and feeling, while the left was honed and focused and precise. They even grew to slightly different sizes, in parts, even though the skull that covers them is evenly shaped. It remained in mainstream medicine a mystery, one that Hydra explored with relish.

But all that resulted from their experimental surgeries were monstrous malfunctions. As it turned out, the left hemisphere dominated most of the body even when separated, and Hydra's soldiers were left imprisoned in the right brain, at best controlling one arm and some eyesight.

Removing the whole left hemisphere also didn't yield any improvements, even after recalibrating what remained. There were even more extreme experiments suggested, but they were deemed too damaging to put the soldiers through, too harmful for staff morale, and too uncertain in their results.

It was clear that a successful subject had to keep all his faculties, all the useful memories in whatever form, while imposing the dominance of the right hemisphere over the left. In a way, the Soldier had been there all along, growing with the unwitting owner of that body, learning, judging for himself and reaching, inevitably, different conclusions.

There always was something slightly more sinister in the right hemisphere, which only emerged when it was freed from the left, or when the left was in a dream state and its control dropped. So it was clear which side Hydra drew its soldiers from, when it freed that part of them with their infernal brain-machines.

The wavering of that edge also explained why her Soldier had such excellent memory, remembering even obscure European countries well, but also their capitals, which Hydra never saw fit to teach him. And as she went through more little things that stood out against the strictures of their base and his missions, it emerged that, though steady, the line that separated her Soldier from someone _else_ was kept at _his_ convenience.

The man underneath was generously lending his memories of what fancy little cufflinks and snow globes felt like, just so the Soldier who had never seen them before could give the right answers. But what she needed to figure out was how much of the control was the Soldier's intention, and how much was unconscious reflex. If the man aimed to sabotage his missions, would the Soldier even know? Worse, if he wasn't aware of anyone else sharing his brain, could he really control him?

_Would he want to?_

For Hydra, her mission was simple: root out the part that dissents, make it submit. They were too focused on efficiency to know what they were truly asking for. They had no idea how bad it could get, or how good...

"That's enough for now. You can open your eyes while I get the next batch, we're almost done. This last bit is just some food tests."

"As long as it's not from the mess hall."

She was halfway to the sink, a small wooden crate in her hands, when she started laughing. "I promise it's not. So it's true what they say? Way to a man's heart..."

"Is through his rib cage."

Her laughter rang through again, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, focusing on the sound of her running her hands under the water, arranging things on a plate, and wiping her hands dry on the threadbare cloth that hung there.

"Close your eyes now." she spoke as she stepped closer from behind. The plate clinked as it met the metallic table, right by his hand, and he smelled and felt the heat of her as she stood right in front of him.

"I'll give you some things to taste, and you just tell me what they are. And they're all pretty soft. Alright? First one. Open..."

Something was nagging him from the back of his brain again, jeering at him for the childish position he was in, but he couldn't think of anything to feel ashamed over.

"Strawberry."

"Good. Now, swallow and... again..."

"Grapes."

"That's right. This next one is a bit, well... Just open and tell me."

He bit into a soft and shapeless thing that tasted like, if anything, a green paste. "I don't know what this is."

"Avocado. Maybe you've never had it before. Better make a wish, then."

"What?"

"Never mind. Open for me again..."

"Mint?"

"Yes, that's a mint leaf. It's perfectly safe, you can swallow. Now, this one will come in a spoon, so open wide." She let the cloying thing slip on his tongue and the taste spread in his mouth in a way that was familiar but unusual.

"Tastes like... roses."

"Yes, that's rose petal jam. If the Director only knew what I spent my funding on, spoiling you..." she giggled, but it died quickly as he kept frightfully still and his jaw tensed. From the corner of her eye she saw the GSR give an angry twitch.

"Right, one more and we're done. Open, and tell m—"

"Plums."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote a first version of the smut that was twice as long and positively filthy, then I rewrote it from scratch so this is the censured-but-still-smut version lol. As I know how it was originally, it still makes sense to me, but I’m not sure about everyone else… Then again, maybe dream sequences are supposed to be fuzzy.
> 
> Yes, the Winter Soldier dreamed that he was Bucky (the way Bucky still remembers himself from the 40s). And Bucky _really_ hates our doctor lady because she's with ebil Hydra, while the Soldier is a big soft dummy who just wants to be held.
> 
> Also, Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who has the distinction of being a doomer before doomers were a thing, nihilism of intergalactic proportions. I found that quote interesting and topical.


	4. The Third Night

_"This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame."_  
— Mervyn Peake

"See you tomorrow, Eeli!"

"Bye!"

"Night, Benji!"

"Good night!"

"Bye, Suzi!"

"Have a good night!"

She said her goodbyes to the evening staff, the duty officer, the cleaning lady, and made her way down the white corridor that led to the bus, which took all the day staff to their living quarters. She tried not to hurry too much, not to hold her purse too close, nor to smile too widely. She breathed a sigh of relief once she took her seat, her head leaning to cool against the window.

Although it was only evening, in the late winter it already looked like the dead of night, blackness stretching out forever starting fifteen feet from wherever you stood. The sparse trees looked like cardboard cut-outs under the stark nightlights, lifeless against a starless sky. There was a tranquillity in the effect: a feeling that, in a world where everything was fake, you too could be whatever you wanted.

The bus bumped along as usual, carrying its quiet cargo, but until she was off it she couldn't shake the nagging shame that was burning a hole in her purse. She surreptitiously squeezed it down, letting herself lean heavily against it while she looked out the window and tried not to think about getting shot.

The apartment complex was easily within driving distance but completely out of view of the Headquarters, even with the flat emptiness that lay between. It was built especially for the civilian workers, and named the Administrative, Medical, Economical, Research and Innovation Cadres Apartments. Or, as Hydra referred to it with great amusement, A.M.E.R.I.C.A..

Its outside inherited the bleakness that came with rushed work, cheap materials, and failed modernist concepts, but the inside had been renovated over the years into something that was at worst ergonomic, and at best managed to be cosy. It almost felt like home, and for a lot of the staff it had to be.

The ride squeaked to a halt, jolting its passengers awake. They waddled out in orderly fashion, saying their thank-yous to the driver, and their good-nights to each other as gradually they each went to their wing.

A few token trees, grown very tall over the decades, were spread around the park before the main entrance, their barren branches lit pale gold by the lamplights. The round fountain at the centre was finally unfrozen for the first time in months, its water sitting in a motionless reflection of the sable sky.

The night guardsman watched everyone amble in, nodding and smiling to whoever spared him a glance as he cradled a chipped mug of coffee in his chubby hands. She mouthed a "Hello" to him and kept on walking, her eyes going back down in what she knew was her usual 'tired' look and nobody spoke to her when they grouped up in the elevator, or when they spread out in their own directions, and then finally she was safely inside her little apartment — locked up and double-bolted.

She placed her purse very carefully on the hallway table. Put her coat up, tucked her shoes away, turned on the lights, turned on the heating, and went through the usual ritual of taking everything off and stuffing it in the laundry bin before taking a shower.

Dinner was, as usual, replaced by a cup of tea and biscuits in bed while her hair slowly dried, wrapped up in a thin old towel. She sipped her tea while scrolling through feeds of news articles, celebrity scandals, the occasional cat video, not really paying attention to anything. As soon as she could justify it to herself, she rolled out of bed and took her cup and plate to the kitchen. She brushed her teeth in a rush, brushed out her tangled hair, then finally approached the purse that was sitting innocuously in waiting.

It was stuffed full of notebooks, emergency cosmetics, obsolete post-its and little lozenge tins, so she had to dig a little until she found the one booklet where, as if by accident, a crisp white page had slipped in. There was hardly any way for someone to detect it, of course — "analog technology" is the safest way to smuggle information — but it didn't stop her from trembling all the way home.

She unfolded it, and smiled tenderly at the sight of the precisely drawn clock face. With the tip of a finger, she could just about feel the indent where the pen first went into the page, a phantom of the energy that passed through his arm for just one moment.

She put all her things away, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed with it. The lamp shining outside was enough for her to make out the page as it rested by her pillow. She had taken it without any particular idea of what to do with it, but she just knew she had to have it, had to have something from him.

The logical side knew that this was a normal emotional reaction for a woman, stuck somewhere without a palatable selection of men, however numerous. Her body recognised, before her head, that the Soldier would be quite a catch even if they weren't stuck in the middle of an industrialised nowhere, and in short order had reached the conclusions that he was: pretty nice, tempting, wasted on Hydra, stupidly beautiful, distractingly virile, before finally settling on him being utterly desirable.

Her head was still stuck at "wasted on Hydra".

But it would get there eventually. The more of him she brought out, the easier it was for her to see him as a person — and people can be admired, liked, and even wanted. For now, she would make do with this schoolyard token and allow herself to enjoy whatever she wanted in her mind.

She already couldn't remember what he felt like under her fingers, how exactly his voice sounded, even his face became blurred the longer she was away from him, but she could easily summon back the memory of what it felt like to be around him.

He was so pliant, especially that first day all strapped up and helpless. It was a heady combination — a dangerous killer rendered harmless. She liked dominance in the opposite sex, but there was just something about a big strong man being subdued like that while she had full control — made even more exciting, paradoxically, by his lack of interest in her.

She noticed him stare quite shamelessly, but blankly; that was just his programming assessing a threat, like all the other soldiers in the program... that's all it had to be. The Director's crass joke at her expense didn't make it any better, as if he wanted to remind her specifically that the Soldier didn't, and couldn't, find her nor any woman desirable.

Still, she could have done anything she wanted with him. The following days when he was free, he still obeyed her every word (mostly). But he also started speaking a little out of turn and telling tepid jokes; the progress, on a professional level, was considerable. When she had him eating out of her hand, it dawned on her how dangerously close she was to taking advantage of him — dangerous, of course, only if she got caught.

Fortunately she’d had the sense to ask for no surveillance, and had nurtured a reputation of being professional to a fault, unmoved by the raw masculinity of the Winter Soldier recruits that her other colleagues openly gushed over, and generally impervious to male charm — mainly to make it easier to turn down flirtations from the desperate men stuck there. _"Don't bother with her. I already tried. You don't stand a chance."_

She understood their loneliness, even sympathised with them, but she couldn't take the chance of opening herself to someone only to be used up, as it happened to so many others stuck there; especially not when none of them made her feel anything. Her Soldier though, he made her feel something... 

He was more than just another big, dangerous man. In their efforts, Hydra had made him into an ideal. Unfortunately, they also misunderstood the nature of what they made. They thought they were creating a weapon — they did — but Hydra treated the masculinity inherent in her Soldier as just an excuse for brutality, deprecating what he really was and could be. Masculinity was about control and power — to be unleashed when _necessary_ and otherwise reined in, a pack of wild dogs left unfed by their master and held back, held back, held back, to be all the more vicious when finally released.

By misusing her Soldier, they misused that which they channelled through him; the source of that ideal inherent to all men but which favoured so few; which expressed itself through tenderness, and ferocity. 

Hydra unwittingly created a weakness, a crack for her to crawl into and bring out that which lay, waiting, underneath the mind. They had no patience for these abstractions, no way to deal with them, and so instead they brought him _down_ and kept him there, ready to use when the brutality was needed.

She closed her eyes and tried to bring back the frissons she felt at the sound of his voice, rough and hanging heavy but so velvety sweet still, the shape of his body silhouetted in the shadows, his artist's-fingers resting obediently on the table, and that surprising mix of chocolate brown hair and grey eyes...

Maybe next time she could have him write something, she could analyse his handwriting; he should definitely still know how... Would he write in cursive or print? Would his letters be thin and sharp, or sensuously curved? Would they be large and take up a lot of space, or small and unassuming like _he_ seemed to be sometimes...

She buried her nose in the pillow, feeling only her own perfume — would he like it? what would it smell like after he spent the night? — and wrapped a leg around the bulky duvet that wasn't nearly big enough to pretend...

Her fingers touched the page again as she squeezed her legs together, her other hand caressing her neck in lighter and lighter touches until she could almost imagine it being his breath, fanning over her skin from above.

She let go of the paper and turned on her back, shivering and sighing, and slipped her hand underneath, down the centre of her chest, stopping just at her lower stomach and pressed down — the way she thought he would if he caught her, if he wanted to hold her still. She bit her lip and teased her throat, content now that her imagination found what it wanted.

Maybe, he wouldn't catch her... Maybe he would break free and come to her, find her in bed, hold her against him, try to seduce her into running away with him. To make it more fun, she'd struggle. She allowed herself a half-bitten moan as she instinctively throbbed at the idea, and pressed harder, canting her hips more and more to an imaginary rhythm that he set.

The thought of his heavy shape pressing her down, his penetrating eyes above her, his uncertain smile, hopeful, desirous, and just that singular pressure... the feeling of being wanted, of being held, in the place where she most wanted him — not even between her legs, but deep, deep in her womb — was more dizzying than any sticky thing she had ever done on her own because she actually _wanted_ him.

She let her imagination exhaust itself while in parallel her mind searched for ways he could break out, of how they could escape together — the mad dream of running away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love that Mervyn Peake quote so much. It's from his novel, Titus Groan. I just... I really feel it.
> 
> Nothing much happened in this chapter except some character... development? Not even that, I apologise. Although we now have a bit more insight into our leading lady. Like I said with the first chapter, she's the "sinnamon roll" part of the trio xD
> 
> I basically tried to re-create the dark!Bucky trope in a female. So yeah, she has a moral compass but it's slightly... unconventional, and she's a bit more obsessive and plotting and calculating than a female/reader is typically written as (which I think is a great missed opportunity! there's some dark!reader fics out there but I've seen like... five). So WS/Bucky are sort of at her mercy and react their own ways, and reveal her moral-greyness that way too cause she is as bad as Bucky sees but at the same time she's also as nice as WS sees. I think that's more realistic than writing a character as 100% good or 100% bad.
> 
> tl;dr:  
> Bucky: SHE IS NOT OUR FRIEND  
> WS: BUCKY JUST STFU, don't listen to him babe please keep touching me ilu
> 
> Next chapter is going to be smutty and quite long though, to make up for this short and mellow one XD


	5. The Fourth Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MORE SMUT AS PROMISED. This will be a bit weird though, but hopefully sweet. Touchings will happen.

_"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."_

— Friedrich Schiller

He stepped in the room the next day and she was waiting for him, as always, sitting down quietly. There were no machines on the table, only some papers… and a plate of plums. She smiled at him as he came in, and saw him smiling back this time.

"Come in. Close the door. We won't share any with them." she jokingly whispered referring to the guardsmen outside. He obeyed and went to take his seat.

"How are you today? Are you well?"

The Soldier nodded without thinking.

"Help yourself to them, by the way." she said, pointing to the plate. The GSR had shown her how much he liked them. "They're not easy to come by around here, better make the most of it."

Now that he had permission, he took a slice and relished the feeling of actually enjoying something he ate. It was a new experience with, yet, an old familiar reaction.

"Today's session is going to be as short or as long as you want it to be. I just want you to do one thing: write on this paper ten sentences…" and she slipped before him a page and a pen, his attention still on the plums, "beginning with the words 'I am'."

His eyes snapped up to her. Seeing that she was serious with her simple but impossible request, he grabbed the pen and stared at the page. He immediately felt like a dumb ox; what was he supposed to write?

"I won't watch, if you want. I'll just stand over there, and you can call me over when you're ready. Alright?" She was smiling and being friendly, but that didn't stop him from feeling tricked somehow. It was, oddly enough, a familiar feeling — that of a schoolboy caught unprepared for a test.

She stood up and went to stand by the door, leaning against the wall while she looked outside through the slot that let in the light from the hallway.

_'I am'_ — what, exactly?

The first thing that came to his mind, of course, was that he was a soldier. He was a man too, but both options felt stupid somehow, vapid. He was also alive, but was that the sort of thing she expected? Was it that simple? Was it a trick?

He barely touched pen to page before lifting it again, dissatisfied and angry. After a few minutes, hearing him grunt and shuffle, her attention went back to him.

"Done already?" She knew he wasn't but walked back anyway, and pretended not to notice how he tried to sink his bulk in the bare wooden chair and hide behind the empty air. "Really, nothing at all?" she asked as she stopped beside him. "Surely you can think of _something_ …" She sounded more teasing than frustrated in her chastisement, but he still avoided her eyes. He heard her sit back down and felt her amused stare burn into his cheek.

"Well, what are you?" she started, pretending to think. "You are a man, right?"

He nodded.

"And — You can write any kind of sentence, such as… You are in a room, yes?"

Nod.

"And you're such and such feet tall. You're sitting down. You are awake. You are dressed. You are writing. You are thinking. You are young… or, are you old? What do you think?"

He finally looked back up at her, in innocent confusion.

"We don't have to decide on that, then. How about… Are you happy?" she tried.

He still hadn't written anything, and seemed even more uncomfortable with himself.

"Too much, I guess…" She got up to walk closer and rested her thighs against the table's edge. "Well, you're healthy. Right?"

Nod.

"And strong. And handsome…"

He looked up slowly at that and found her looking down at him, gently but with focus.

"Did you know that you're handsome?"

"That's eleven sentences."

"Oh… Is it?"

She hesitated for a couple of heartbeats, thinking, then decided. _What would a man do?_

Slowly, she slipped her knees between his spread thighs, gripped the back of his chair with her hands, and leaned ever-so-slightly in. To the side of her, she heard the pen clatter on the table as it slid from his limp fingers and he leaned back. _Away from her? Oh. No matter._

Her right hand, hot and soft, came down to caress the side of his face, and she bit her lip tightly to keep a too-excited smile from breaking out. His eyes looked straight up into hers and his lips parted on their own when she tilted her head on the way to kissing him, but with an involuntary impulse he leaned back further against the chair.

"I can't." he said — half-chocked, half-conviction.

"It's alright, I… I won't…" she started, taken aback by how definitive his rejection was.

"It's not that. I can't…"

"What do you mean 'you can't'?"

"I can't touch you."

She finally leaned away from him, if only a little. "…Who said that?"

His fists clenched impotently, one on his knee the other still on the table, and finally he admitted: "The Director."

She backed up further to look at him and think about what that meant. In the back of her mind, she was relieved that his rejection didn't actually come from any revulsion to her, but only to disobeying orders. "Why would the Director tell you not to touch me?"

He was sat down quietly as ever, but never had a man looked more desperate to run away.

"Soldier." she called a bit more firmly. "Why would the Director say that?"

"He c— saw me…" he confessed.

She let him simmer in his guilt while she considered the implications, which were altogether too delicious and threatened to run away with her. Keeping her voice calm, she dug further. "What did he see you do?"

The Soldier only huffed and swallowed his words, bracing his feet against the floor, looking down to the ground, fighting with himself like a half-domesticated beast. When he didn't answer quickly enough, she dipped down, perching on her high heels, and leaned with her hands against his knees to look up searchingly into his eyes.

"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to" _That's a lie._ "but you know I'm not like him. I won't get angry with you, or disgusted…" and she watched his face carefully for the twitch of the muscles that predictably came at the corner of his mouth. There was an admission there, but also curiosity. "You can say anything." she soothed, rubbing his knee comfortingly. "How bad can it be…?"

_Very._

"Come on, tell me… What happened?"

Thread by tenuous thread, he allowed her to unravel that which held his chest in a tight grip. "I was dreaming. About you."

She looked at him in a sly, satisfied way, having finally caught him in the lie she'd long since suspected; but now she didn't have the heart to reproach him. The fact that he had dreamed of her only added a personal satisfaction on top of the professional one. _He's recovering more quickly than he let on. Not only dreams, but lies too._

"And what were _you doing_ in your dream?"

He shifted and, instead of counting the cracks in the concrete, moved his attention to his left, to a dark corner, ever further from her eyes. She knew what it was, otherwise she wouldn't have asked, and he partly hated her for it. For how close she was when she asked him that. For how she rubbed his knee in a way that made him throb.

"It wasn't… I wasn't myself in my dream."

"How do you mean?"

"I wasn't there at all, like I didn't exist. There was this other this man, he didn't look like me, or sound like me, or think like me — I don't know how I know what he thought. I guess I was him, but I wasn't."

"I see… And how did the Director find out what you were dreaming about?"

A certain part of him wanted to kick her off him and choke her and break her neck for making him feel that way, for making him a coward in front of her — _her_ of all people. But another part, more in control and much more encompassing, knew he couldn't stand to see her so much as afraid. It was a strange feeling, to want to kill someone — to _want_ it, not just be ordered to — but also want to protect her from anything and everything in the world and see her alive and happy and just _see her_ , every day.

So he took a deep breath and willed his eyes back to hers, waiting wishfully before and beneath him, and sucked in one good long look to work up the nerve to barely admit: "He saw me… How I was… because of you." The Soldier shifted, wanting her hot little hands off his knees but she held on and pressed forward.

"How could he see you?"

"Through the cameras. He came in soon after." He remembered clearly the supercilious sneer, the lazy gait, the direct command, and his _own_ shame and fear and anger. "Ordered me not to touch you, not to tell you about my dreams."

"When was this?"

"The… the first morning." and he didn't need to explain which day or how many ago.

"Was it a _nice_ dream, at least?" she dared to ask.

"Not exactly."

That knocked a bit of her glee off, until she noticed the leer of longing in his eyes.

Without giving herself the chance for one more treasonous thought, she raised herself back up. To the Soldier's surprise, her hands went straight to his belt and started tugging, unclasping, clumsily pulling it out like a dead snake.

"What—"

"The Director might have said you can't touch, but he never said anything like that to _me_. Arms behind your back."

He had enough wherewithal to realise what she was asking for wasn't exactly respecting the spirit of the order, but he also had enough sense to not argue. So the Soldier put his arms back behind the seat, and allowed her to tie his wrists together with the thick black belt — a useless effort as he could probably break it off if he tried.

After she finished a few thorough loops and knots, her hand lingered on him, then up his metal arm, his shoulder, his neck, threading through his tousled hair before finally cupping his cheek in a touch so small and warm and timid as to be completely unfamiliar. And he saw in her eyes the same surprise he felt, as if discovering a new world that could only bridged through another.

She turned and sat sideways across his lap, her other hand holding onto the back of the chair, her feet dangling a few inches off the ground. He brought his knees in a bit closer to make a comfier seat — he could hardly feel the weight of her, but at the same time that delicious little pressure was all his body knew.

She took her time settling in, working up the courage, thinking, fearing… and he felt ready to just break out of the belt-binds and pull her closer and crush her against him, but she finally got the nerve, and leaned in, and with her eyes never leaving his placed one chaste kiss against his mouth.

The Soldier stayed still, suspended in tension against the chair, against her hopeful gaze, against the welcoming scent of her cheek — and inwardly, worst of all, felt a forgotten part of himself brace for impact like an anchor sinking fathom after slick fathom in soft ink.

She closed her eyes when she went to savour his lower lip, then his scruffy chin, the sunken cheek, the hard outline of his cheekbone… He opened his mouth hungrily and leaned in to chase after her but she kept her kisses punishingly pure — as if he was nothing better than a love letter or a child's bruised knee or a venerable family cat.

When her kisses reached his throat he could — finally — bury his face in her hair at least, and breathe her in to burn from inside his lungs out through his whole body, and stay there forever. She must have found that flesh particularly satisfying; she parted her lips and opened her mouth and bit, just gently, across his skin, then lapped over the damp muscle that arched in tension there and thrummed with his moans.

Slowly, she allowed herself to feel him, strength leaving her arms as more of her soft chest leaned into his, rubbing the black t-shirt against his feverish skin and his heart nearly leapt out to join hers. He could feel her cant her hips on his thighs as her wet kisses moved from one rough jaw, to the other, then down his neck where wet heat pooled, lapping, lapping against his muted groans.

She leaned back to look at him, blushing and dizzy, and offered up her mouth with a teasing smile. He dipped to take it, but she just pulled back — once, twice, then a terrible third. "I thought you weren't supposed to touch me." she cooed against his starving lips. "Naughty, naughty boy."

An uncharacteristically pitiful sound ground past his teeth as she got off his lap and balanced herself between his eagerly widening thighs. He didn't even have time to shift in his pulsing discomfort before she crouched back down, legs held primly tight in her skirt, and started shoving his t-shirt up.

By this point, he didn't dare think about what she wanted from him anymore, so he decided not to think at all and let his head lean drunkenly back.

She could only roll it up so much before his thick bound arms stopped it, but it gave her enough to admire under the dismal light. He could feel the trembling in her fingers as she traced his chest, his ribs, his tensing abdomen, and suddenly his legs were bracing against the floor again.

Her elbows rested on his thighs as her fingers caressed their way downward until they reached, just gently tip-teasing, the edge of his trousers, but didn't pull them down nor move closer to where he was aching. Her lips left kisses on his damp stomach, what was left of her lipstick smudging blood-red wherever she found a particularly admirable divot to sink into. She didn't even bother to look up at him, nor did she lavish his body with any particular aim — she seemed content to just kiss what she found for kissing's-sake, healing one imaginary wound at a time with the complete abandon of someone who found life worth living only in a singular beloved.

Those ticklish explorations and her torturous hands were scraping at the edge of his restraint and soon he could barely keep himself from pulling at the knots around his wrists — tensing before remembering to sit still, then pulling again, one arm trembling the other changing calibration with a mind of its own. The chair too was scraping against the naked concrete in his longing to get away, to get closer, to get more of her, and the sound could barely cover the traitorous echoing of his moans.

His hips tried in vain to reach, at least a little bit, any part of her body, thrusting up into the infinite indifferent air between them, but all he managed was to rub himself again his tightening pants, and even that was just about enough, but not _nearly_.

"I need…" He couldn't finish begging because he didn't know how, wasn't supposed to know how, but it still seeped through every sound he made.

With her mouth still suckling on a shapely curve of muscle at his waist, she looked up, and her little claws sunk into his thighs at the sight of him: heaving, dishevelled, completely at her mercy. Those large grey eyes, now glassy and pleading, searched her face from behind the tendrils of his hair that fell to frame the marble-pale angles of his face — that face which used to be so stoic, so frightfully empty, now chipped away by a patter of kisses to reveal underneath a peachy-soft and blushing boy, who was forced to grow too fast.

She raised herself off him, suddenly abashed and pitying, and his heart stuttered with the panic that she was leaving… but she stayed right there. Within the bulky frame of his legs, she balanced herself on one high heel and kneeled with the other on the small space left on the chair between them. Her hands caressed his heavy head, brushed his hair away, and she rested her lips above his brow in a silent and continuous kiss.

He was so warm, she could feel it through his clothes, could almost feel the throbbing and churning of his desire in time with his whimpers as he took what little she offered and rubbed himself gratefully, desperately against her small, hard knee. His head fell forward suddenly as his whole body curled in on itself in her embrace and with one, two, three painful pulsations, finally released.

She kept kissing and cooing against his overheated skin as he worked himself through it, biting his lip through heaving gasps, burying his groans in her chest, and she realised in passing that that was the loudest she had ever heard him be. Even after the energy was drained from him and he calmed down, she could still feel aftershocks of his pleasure tremble against her leg as a little more and more was pushed out of him, seemingly never ending, until it did.

His breath ran hot and cold as it fanned over her skin, through her shirt, while he slowly came back to himself. She didn't move away, content to hold him close as long as he needed. Her fingers soothed his forehead while her chin rested on top of his head, her eyes far away in the quiet. Her heart was still drumming away and he didn't even need to strain himself to hear it while he felt his own, beating to match her rhythm, and then slowly come down, together.

"Are you alright, my darling?" she asked in an easy voice that masked her concern. He didn't say anything, just buried his face deeper in her shoulder and hummed contentedly.

She could feel the cloying dampness between her own legs collect and start to cool. Her lower lips ached as if beaten and were still throbbing. The virile scent of him beneath her didn't help _at all_ , but it didn't matter anymore either. She had only wanted to cherish him, even at the dreadful prospect of his indifference — which, as a gift, turned out not to be so; to give and give and give to the point of nonexistence until all that was left of her was the spark that burned for him, for as long as he needed it.

She dedicated so much of her energies to the mission, to the work, to the distant goals of glory that Hydra promised, and she once thought that to leave behind useful things was her chance at true freedom from the mundane materialism that had sickened her into this exile in the first place. But within the unexpected package of one kidnapped and brainwashed soldier, imprisoned to a degree he didn't even comprehend, she found a gate to something so much better — one small form of immortality through immolation.

Her attention went to back to his arms, still tied behind him, and the way that left shoulder gleamed in the low sepulchral light caught her eye. One hand went to caress its silver surface until she caught sight of the clandestine mark they put on him. "I hate that ugly thing." she spoke with genuine disgust, her nails catching against the symbol there. "Wish I could scratch away this red satanic star."

The Soldier couldn't tell if it was some possessiveness of hers talking or just the Hydra zealot, jealous of a competing cult, but he felt too weary to hold those walls up anymore, and too serene in her arms to care.

She moved away from him, gently letting go, stumbling a little in her stiff ankles and straightening her skirt on her way around. She undid the knots and rubbed a little at the wrist that bore its marks. After a parting kiss to the bent back of his neck, she dropped the belt on his lap. "Let's get you cleaned up." she whispered.

He heard her fumbling with something, and then there was a quick run of water at the sink in the corner. The Soldier had just barely straightened himself in the chair when she came back around and started wiping down his chest with a slightly damp handkerchief. He looked down at her and she looked back, slightly blushing the lower she went, until she reached his trousers and paused.

With an awkward smile, she handed him a batch of tissues and hurried back to the sink.

He had to smile too, almost laughing at the odd standards of her shyness. He unbuttoned himself and wiped off the gooey seepage, wincing and going gently as the cool air hit the raw parts of him. His pants were still quite soiled on the inside, and his t-shirt was damp but drying; it would have to do.

It didn't take long for him to straighten himself out, to put his shirt and his belt and everything back together while she got rid of the evidence, and when she turned back to look at him it was almost as if nothing had happened. He stood up and turned to find her walking straight toward him, just like that first day. Only this time she was smiling, her steps were gentled by the aches and stiffness, and it wasn't just the Soldier she was looking at, but also someone… else.

His feet stood firm while he waited for her, but as soon as she was within reach he curled a hand around her hip and leaned down — only for her to press against his broad chest and pull away.

"We have to leave soon, or they'll come looking for us." The Soldier swallowed his complaints and nodded in understanding. _Of course it was too much to ask…_ And then the killing blow: "I can't see you tomorrow."

"What. Why not?"

"We have a staff briefing all morning, and then I'll have to write a report on your progress, and I have to make something up about this session, and I'll be busy with meetings the rest of the day…"

She was holding something back. His eyes stayed on her body and he rediscovered how small she was beneath him, so steady but so close to wavering. He held her still by the hip, pressing into the fragile skin of her abdomen while his other hand went up to grip the base of her neck. To anyone else it would have been a threat, but she drank in his rough touch with calm. His thumb edged the neckline of her shirt away to reveal brand new skin stretching over birdlike bones.

Her eyes stayed on his, her smile ever-tender as she looked up into his troubled face, completely trusting in his murderer's-hands. The Soldier bent down to kiss the curve of a clavicle as he held her firmly in his arms and asked, again, "Why can't you see me?"

He let her battle with her conscience as he moved his hands down her sides, one hot one metal-cold, gently down and up her thighs, gallantly avoiding the curves of her behind to rest at the small of her back as he let himself fall from underneath her hands and go down on one knee in front of her.

"I'll see you again. Maybe… maybe next week…"

He could hear the breath tense out of her body as he brought his face dangerously close to her, but instead of aiming for the source of that sweet warm scent, he rested his lips right over her lower stomach, kissing now this way, now that, through her clothes and her skin, wanting her to know exactly where he wished he could reach, and take root.

A pair of hands came to rest on his head and caress the hair out of his face, then quietly and shakily she confided "They're considering you for a new mission."

He hummed against her, listening but uncaring.

"Maybe I can try to see you before you're sent off." she said pensively as her hands slipped to his shoulders. "Yes, I can stop by and say… maybe even get an approval…"

_Don't trust this devious Hydra bitch!_

_Would you shut up for once?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You thought the dubcon tag was for Bucky, didn't you? I bet you did. SURPRISE. I love female-initiated dubcon, I haven't seen nearly enough fics with it, so this is my contribution. Also, a n g s t.
> 
> And that "10 I am sentences", I can't find a reference for it anywhere, but it's something we worked with at university as an interviewing prompt, it's pretty fun!


	6. The Last Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things:  
> 1\. I am sorry.  
> 2\. I have been moved to an undisclosed location for my own security following the publication of this chapter.
> 
> HAVE FUN :D

_"To get everything you want is not a good thing. Disease makes health seem sweet. Hunger leads to the appreciation of being full-fed. Tiredness creates the enjoyment of resting."_

— Heraclitus

She wasn't supposed to be in the office on that day, at that hour. She spent all of the previous day mismanaging her tasks and various paperwork to create the plausibility of needing overtime. It was easy enough to convince one of her friends to drive her to the Headquarters, and she picked one that had no family just in case Hydra got overzealous… later.

One small mercy was that the whole building was mostly empty, except for the bare-bones of military personnel and the medical staff getting the Asset ready. They were due to fly him out late at night, and the sun was low in the sky.

The few staff who were there were surprised to see her, but she reassured them with easy smiles and a ditzy attitude that everything was fine. The Director was still in a meeting, said Suzi at the front desk, but he'd been there for hours and should be out any minute. And the Asset? "In his cell."

She went into her office like it was any other day, put on her lab coat, put her things the same place she usually did, and took only what she needed.

The way to the Soldier's cell was something she had mapped out a few days ago, first out of curiosity, then determination — and while she was at it, took note of a few more interesting pathways through the facility. The only thing to worry about were the guards.

"I'm here for a final evaluation before he's in the field."

"We weren't informed about that."

"Then go ahead and call the Director. I'm sure the Standard Operating Procedures are foremost in his mind."

The two guardsmen looked at each other, silently goading the other to pick up the radio while she nervously twirled a syringe with one hand, clenched a well-loved page in her pocked with the other.

"Go on, call him."

"…Door opened."

Her Soldier was waiting on the bed in his frightening black gear, hands clenched, feet apart, looking ready to pounce. He must have heard her coming a corridor away, and once he finally saw her there, his face broke into the most brilliant smile.

She grinned and snuck in the corner, right beneath the view of the camera. Silently, she beckoned him closer and uncapped the syringe, nodding to the men outside. He subdued them easily enough and, without even asking what she was thinking, followed her out: down the winding corridors, through parts stuck in reconstruction, in and out of the large dark meeting rooms she had the keys for.

They inevitably met a few guards on patrol, which the Asset could hear much in advance. When he first stopped her, arm out and hard which nearly took the wind out of her, she was frightened for a moment that he'd changed his mind. But he kept his eyes straight ahead, and she could tell by looking at him that he was listening intently.

With a feline slink, he stepped back and kept her behind him, further, further, into the doorway of a locked room while he holstered the guns they took from his keepers. She held onto him and steadied her breath against his back while he waited, silent as a statue, for the right moment. The men reached and passed them by, only just noticing him when it was too late — when one had his neck broken and the other was knocked out.

"Turn." he told her. She faced the wall without thinking and only heard a fleshy crack as he caved in the man's skull. Then he took her hand in his and led her away.

When there were too many at once, five of them approaching from somewhere to the left, he had them both crouch down in wait until the targets passed by the mouth of their corridor. They probably couldn't even see her, a minuscule target shielded behind him, as he steadily took them down with a shot to the head before they could even reach for their coms. The sound echoed through the emptiness, but she assured him they were almost out.

Within minutes, they reached a long white corridor, more civilian looking than the rest. At its end, an open door leading to a vast field and rows of jeeps and busses.

"We've made it." she laughed breathlessly, looking up to find him still tense and alert but smiling with her.

One leaping step after another and suddenly, in one breath, he was out. He had been out before, of course, but never like this. The coolth of the evening in early spring soothed his flushed skin as he walked out over the blackened earth and melting snow, a pale sun dipping beyond the horizon.

The Soldier already eyed a vehicle that looked good for the terrain, easy to hijack, small enough to be dumped somewhere once they were far enough away to start covering their tracks. He turned around to see her catching her breath as she took in the sight of him with pride, and relief, and some fear. She threw a chain of keys at him and he caught it mid-air.

"They're colour-coded with the jeeps. If you go South, in 15 miles there's an apartment complex. That's where the staff lives, keep driving. There are trackers on all the cars, but they stop transmitting beyond a 70 mile radius. Nearest settlement is 90 miles South-Southwest, an old fishing town."

"What?"

"The gate behind you, further that way, it'll be locked by now but the hinges are old and rusted."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"So you can escape, of course."

"But you're coming with me."

"I can't."

It was then that he noticed she hadn't stepped a foot outside, standing in the doorway at the very edge, one hand holding onto the frame. The rest of the facility was open behind her, a hungry maw empty and quiet.

"What do you mean you can't? Come with me."

"I took a oath. I can't leave my post unless dismissed or dead." she recited with chill equipoise.

Just like in the bad old days, the Soldier felt madness creeping in. "Then why let me go?"

"Hydra serves a noble goal, but what they were doing to you was wrong. They've never understood that, because they don't want to, because it's not convenient right now."

In the distance, through layers of concrete, he could hear them shouting to each other, panicking, having found the bodies. It wouldn't take long for them to figure it out.

"You know what they'll do to you..." he said, coming closer and just about ready to grab her but stopping, for now, right in front. The heat radiating off his body kept the evening breeze away and warmed her.

She felt the same horror he felt, but just shook her head. "I have to keep my honour."

"You don't need honor, you're just a dame!"

She cracked a smile at his odd choice of words, the unintended slight washing over her, ' _just a…'_. "Then why does it matter what happens to me?"

He placed his arms on either side, crowding her in the doorway and poised to pull her out. The shouting was always getting closer, she should start to hear it soon. "Because you're mine."

The smile paled from her lips and he thought he had finally gotten through. She looked around, searching for something and moved slightly closer, almost in his arms… And then a wall of metal bars came up at the push of a button, her sad face left in its penumbra. He gripped them instantly and started pulling.

"It's no use, even your arm isn't enough to break them." she consoled, placing her hands on his fists as much for his benefit as for her own. But he wouldn't let go and obstinately shook his head, mute with anger and going through any number of wild schemes in his head that could break her out.

"You know… I've always had loved perfection, which is so well embodied in you." she spoke, leaning forward and holding his gaze. "They couldn't destroy you. They could only displace you, for a while. They can't destroy me either." she tried to comfort him. "Nothing can be destroyed. So don't worry."

He wanted to argue with her that it wasn't the same thing at all, that she was crazy, that it could be so bad, so much worse than she could imagine. As if reading his mind, she smiled and shook her head, and gave him a small kiss from between the bars. Then she turned around in a white flutter and ran away, down the corridor, further inside, the echo of her high heels clipping on the concrete drowned out by his angry shouts. She disappeared around the corner to the right, head kept intently down and not daring to look at him again. She kept one hand in her pocket, secretly caressing that white page with the clock he'd drawn for her.

The Soldier shook at the cage that stood in his way until he heard the boots and rattling of ammo one door away, and a gate opening further afield, outside. When the first shot rang and hit above his head, he turned and emptied what was left of a cartridge into the guardsman without even thinking. Then in an instant, one thoughtless instinct moved his body to the vehicle he had picked earlier. He planned to go back for her, but a thought in his head said: _Later_. The black car keys went in, just like she said, and he quickly found himself driving away. Now he just needed to find another way into the building. _Sure, later_.

One hand on the steering wheel, he took aim at the hinges of the closed gate in front and blew them loose enough for him to speed through and break it open, while shots rang out behind him. Maybe it was the air or the temperature outside, but he suddenly noticed just how heavy his left arm was, how cold, and how rigid. He didn't mean to drive very far, just far enough that he'd be out of sight and could circle around another way. He had to go back for her. _Just a little bit later._

He navigated the half-frozen terrain to cross the 70 miles in well under an hour, the sound of his pursuers long faded away. He ditched the car in an overgrown ravine, and by midnight he reached the sleepy town she'd mentioned. His heart could finally afford to shrivel in his chest at the realisation that he hadn't gone back, and she wasn't there.

She must have known this place, must have seen once what he was seeing now, stepped on the same dirt road, breathed a different air under the shelter of the same sky — once, longer ago, before she knew him. His feet carried him on as his mind stayed behind and he struggled with himself, and with the burden of her last request — to not worry anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might have accidentally totally unintentionally forgotten to tag this as having a SAD TRAGIC HORRIBLE ENDING.
> 
> Nah, but really, it's not… that bad. The reader/MC death is just assumed by the characters themselves, but not implied even in the narration. Hence why I didn't tag for it either. I might even do a followup for this fic at some point (probably not, but the option is totally open).
> 
> Anyway, thank you guys so much for sticking with me through all of this 😭 You've all been great and I am so happy to have shared this fic with you <3


	7. Appendix: inspiration, credits, and references

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just credits and helpful links, not a real chapter but I really wanted to share this stuff because it's only fair and/or useful.

1\. [The first imagine that served as inspiration.](https://hushyourimaginationistalking.tumblr.com/post/172134124073/)

2\. [The second imagine that served as inspiration.](https://hushyourimaginationistalking.tumblr.com/post/155852258252/)

3\. _"I'm going to touch the sides of your face. You will tell me if it feels the same." —_ [Cranial nerve test.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrKbOF3vHo8)

4\. _"I'm going to say three words. Try to remember them." —_ [Neuropsychology test.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ou5LVaapg)

5\. _"And besides, wiping him repeatedly probably resets his integration level." —_[Kazimierz Dąbrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration)

6\. _"It's just a GSR monitor." —_ [Galvanic Skin Response.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodermal_activity)

7\. _"But all that resulted from their experimental surgeries were monstrous malfunctions." —_ Severing the Corpus Callosum resulting in [Alien Hand Syndrome.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome)

8\. _"There were even more extreme experiments attempted, but they were deemed too damaging to put the soldiers through" —_ A reference to [Project MKUltra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra), [Project ARTICHOKE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_ARTICHOKE) , [the Pitești Phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison), and [other attempts at brainwashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost_Meerloo), particularly [re-education through torture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session).

9\. _"Hydra serves a noble goal, but what they were doing to you was wrong." —_ The psychology at play here merits several references. The short version of it is that people can convince themselves that what they're doing is right, even if what they're doing is wrong, because their mind has to try to cope. A few links that deal with this:

  * a. [The Milgram Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment): where some people gave (what they _thought_ were) electric shocks, even to the point of death, to innocent people because a scientist told them to do it.
  * b. [The Asch conformity experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments): a series of experiments where people changed their behaviour based on being told they belonged to a group, and sided with that group in spite of their true thoughts or feelings, because they were afraid of being socially isolated.
  * c. [Cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance): the basic idea that if you are forced to do something you disapprove of, your brain convinces you it's not as bad as you think it is to preserve your self-esteem and sanity.




End file.
